


boy you fill my lungs with sweetness

by klainjel



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, lio contemplates what just happened and more particularly: what has happened between him and Galo, small spoilers, this happens immediately after the end of the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21741238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klainjel/pseuds/klainjel
Summary: Lio doesn't know how life will change now, and he doesn't know what happens next, but he does know one thing: he is Lio and he is Galo and something has changed.
Relationships: Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos
Comments: 12
Kudos: 175





	boy you fill my lungs with sweetness

**Author's Note:**

> i couldn't find a post-canon promare fic i liked so i decided to write one
> 
> small spoilers for the ending of the film.
> 
> title adapted from Bloom by The Paper Kites

It was either sunset or sunrise. After everything that had happened, it was hard to tell. All Lio Fotia could tell for sure was that the sun was somewhere beyond them, kissing the spot where the earth meets the sky, casting the world in an endless shade of peachy orange. That, and that his chest was rising in time to the body towering beside him.

He wasn’t sure how this had happened. He didn’t know how they were alive, but somehow, they had survived.

Not them. Not us. We. Him. Me.

Somehow, in the past twenty-four hours, he had died and been reborn not once, but twice. It was the same skin, but the insides had changed. Instead of the storm of endless pink flames, swirling into whirlwinds of orange and grey, in the landscape of his chest, he felt tall grass sprout from the ash. Where there had once been nothing but destruction, tiny flowers on trellis began to bloom.

He didn’t know if he liked it, but he supposed this was what he had to deal with now.

The voice beside him pulled him out of himself. Huh. Strange. He still wasn’t used to hearing Galo’s voice like that—from inside of himself. When Galo spoke, he wasn’t a voice among many. Instead, he rung out, echoing in Lio’s head long after the sound had ended. It caused him to stare at his lips for perhaps a second too long as he tried to remember the way they had moved, the words they had formed.

If Galo noticed, all he did was grin.

It had been a long night to a very long life.

“Well. We better clean up,” Galo had said, registering in Lio’s head long after his voice had stopped sounding. He always spoke so loud, so brightly that it made Lio’s flames dim in comparison. Had made his flames dim. They weren’t his anymore (had they ever been?). He was still staring.

“Lio? Did you hear me?” Close, close, too close. Galo’s face swooped in, blocking out the sun which only created a halo around the outline of his frame. The shadows cast over his face made everything the more visible: the Athenian line of his nose; the bow of his lips; the way his eyes shot like an arrow right into the place where Lio supposed he must keep his soul.

For someone so bright, Lio hated being visible.

He shoved his hand in Galo’s face, pushing him back as he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Idiot. Haven’t you heard of a thing called ‘personal space’?”

He felt Galo’s grin brush against the life line on his palm (or was it love? Oh Gods, please let it be life and not love). “I think we’re a bit beyond personal space now, don’t you?”

Maybe they were. Maybe his words spoke more than the truth, a gift that Lio was starting to discover his companion had. While Lio made sure to speak so that verisimilitude dripped from every syllable and sound, Galo spoke with a sincerity that said much more than his words ever did. It was his honesty to himself that let Galo burn fiercer than the fires he swore to protect others from.

(But didn’t he know? Hadn’t he yet realized that to douse a fire really only gave it reason more to burn?)

There was something about being locked in—mind, body, and soul—with another person that can really make personal space seem irrelevant. They had merged, somehow. What had once been water and oil turned out to be nothing more than two different tides merging into one grandiose stream.

Galo de Lion. Lio de Galon.

Did it matter?

Had it even been real?

(even if it hadn’t, hadn’t he felt it? Didn’t he feel it still? It was in the eyes—in the only flames that hadn’t left him with the rest).

Lio kicked at the ground. A stone crumbled from the pile and rushed down into the dead space below. They had so much left to do. Maybe it was a sunrise, because this was more a beginning than an end.

“Galo,” Lio said, watching as his companion straightened his back. Huh. He liked that effect. “You better get to work.”

“Huh? Me? Why just me?!”

And Lio felt the smile stretch across his face, at once foreign and familiar. “Isn’t this what you do? Help people?”

“Yeah.” He placed his hands triumphantly on his hips and tipped his head in a way that made him look like a hero from the stories his mother used to—

No. Let’s not go there. Not today. Maybe not ever, but especially not today.

“Help _your_ people,” Galo continued.

Lio blinked, then huffed. “They’re your people now too.”

They started walking—forward, not back. Everyone else began to wake up too, and the clean up commenced. First, to free everyone. Then, to make sure everyone had a place to go and a spot to be. Then, place the pieces of the world back together until the puzzle had less holes than when it began.

Lio worked mostly in silence, speaking only when his people needed him to. Galo, surprisingly, was also silent, working diligently at his side, then away. They worked until their bones ached and the power of today pressed back into his skin. There were still so many left, calling for him in their silenced voices. Without the promare, they didn’t know how to speak to each other, but they would learn. They had to. He wouldn’t finish until they knew when they closed their eyes that Lio was there, that he had never left them, that he never could.

A shadow enveloped around him. He shivered, but he wasn’t quite cold. He was warm-less, and he thought he would be for perhaps the rest of his life, but he wasn’t cold. Yet, his body shivered, and a coat dropped upon his shoulders. “Come on. It’s time to go.”

Lio stood and shrugged the jacket off his shoulders so it dropped into a pile at his feet. “Go? Go where, Galo? Where is there to go?”

Galo’s eyes dropped to his jacket and how it lay crinkled in the dirt at Lio’s feet. He wanted to stomp on it, just to watch his face turn. He wanted to strike a match and watch it burn, but there was no desire for flame in him anymore. Only a desire for an end to the feeling of empty that was growing in his head.

“Home,” Galo replied, and for a second, Lio hated him. He felt his anger rise up in his throat at home easily he could say that, as if that was just an option for them both. His fingernails pressed into his palm.

“Home?” Lio spat, throwing his arms out at the wasteland behind them. “Tell me, where is home for me—for the Burnished? Don’t—” he cut Galo’s opening mouth off by holding his finger up firmly. “Don’t tell me they’re no longer Burnish, because we are still burned.”

There is no way this would be forgotten; that they wouldn’t be blamed. It wasn’t there fault, but there would be those who would refuse to take blame. It was easier to push it onto someone else than to admit you had been wrong.

Instead of backing away, Galo took a step forward. He had always been too foolishly brave. “We’ll work to bandage you then. _I’ll_ work and work and work until everyone knows what happened here.”

He believed him, despite all odds. Lio felt his limbs begin to droop as the anger seeped out and into the soil beneath their feet.

“We still don’t have a home. I can’t leave them—they need me.”

Another step forward. He towered over him, but never made Lio feel small. He liked that, although sometimes… sometimes he wouldn’t mind being small if it meant that someone else would carry this weight for awhile.

“There are places for them. Shelters, and emergency resources. We firefighters aren’t just here for our looks,” Galo gave a lopsided grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “We help people, and we’ll help these people too.”

Lio took a step back. “And what about me?”

He watched the Adam’s apple in Galo’s throat move up and down. “We’ll go home.”

We. Home. Lio’s stomach plummeted and then rose like a phoenix. No. He couldn’t—he couldn’t let this become us, even when it had already happened. As though his eyes had been closed and the entire world had twisted like a Van Gogh. The same, but different. Alone, but never _alone_.

“I don’t have a home,” Lio found himself snapping back with as much bite as he could manage. He turned away, crossing his arms over his chest. Where had the sun gone, and why did he feel so cold?

“I do.”

It was the way he said it; softly, and all at once. As if if he didn’t say the words now—simple as they may be—he never would. Galo’s gaze was unwavering, too heavy. It was ice, shooting right back into his eyes and straight to his chest and cracking something he didn’t realize needed to be broken.

Lio did the only thing he could do: he tipped his head back and laughed.

When he threw his head back up, Galo hadn’t moved. His lips were parted though, and that made the bitter taste in his belly boil over. “And so what, Galo?” He must have looked crazed; eyes wide and hair flying everywhere. He didn’t bother pushing it back from his face; he couldn’t stop the wind anymore than he could now halt a flame. “What am I supposed to do with that? Congratulations, you have somewhere to live! Good for you!”

Galo’s hair blew nearly sideways. He hadn’t moved, not even flinched. With his hand, he flicked a strand of hair out of his face, but it immediately blew back. His voice, unlike the wind, was unwavering. “Do you remember? What happened?”

Lio could lie. It would be so easy to. To lie and pretend, but he was done with hurting. We Burnish never killed and to lie would be to kill a part of him that had only recently begun to bloom.

Galo hadn’t said what he meant, but he didn’t need to. Lio remembered everything. He remembered being colder than he had ever been and so goddamn tired and ready. He hadn’t wanted to go, but with the coldness spiraling up his arms, he couldn’t see any other way, and he was ready to let his body return to the earth where it had begun.

But then—a warmth like he had never felt before. Not the desire to burn, or to singe flesh; not even the spark of excitement he felt before battle. A warmth that felt more like—like—he didn’t know what it felt like. It was cozier than the crackling of firewood and brighter than the first beams of the sun and it encased him all, beginning in his lips and soaking into his chest until his fingers and his toes brimmed with excitement and life.

And it was a body over him and it was a flame that returned to him and he was smart enough to know that when the man who smelled like smoke and cinnamon could have pulled away, he didn’t.

And Lio hadn’t moved because he hadn’t wanted it to end. His fingers itched and twitched and were desperate to entangle themselves into dirt, hair, or skin. But if he moved, they would awaken, and it would all be over, and it might never happen again.

So Lio had done the only thing he could do. He had pressed up, putting pressure against Galo’s lips and he felt the startle that went through him, and then he had pushed back and their lips moved and danced and Lio had gasped as everything in his life came together in that one very moment and suddenly he was full of not only life but _light._

But the moment had ended, like all dreams do.

“I do,” Lio finally responded. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, and it certainly wouldn’t be now, but he felt something wet and unfamiliar and he blinked twice fast. “Do you?”

Galo’s eyes never left his. “I do.”

Galo stepped forward, or maybe Lio did, or maybe they both did, but suddenly Lio’s forehead was on Galo’s chest and breathing in his smoke and flames that felt so close to home that he _could_ have cried, if he wanted to.

Galo’s fingers splayed across his spine and pressed into the soft skin of his back. Lio breathed and breathed and breathed, until Galo’s breathing matched his own.

Lio stepped away first, flipping his hair back from his eyes as though nothing had ever happened. He cleared his throat and looked towards the horizon. The sun, at some point, had disappeared, leaving nothing but pink streaks of remembrance across the sky. “You… you said you had a place.”

He didn’t need to see him to feel his grin. “Yeah. I do. A home.”

“Home,” Lio repeated. With his eyes still ahead, he reached out until his fingers felt a palm, and Lio traced along the lines until their fingers intertwined.

And he felt it then, in a way he never thought he would again.

Warmth. 


End file.
